Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3771394" data-attributes="member: 5143">I believe there is a 3rd option that is between those two.  An encounter where given MORE than modest skill you will clearly win.Basically, I find that my players would prefer to know that they are near invincible(like they had a 5% chance of dying each encounter).  But only because they know what they are doing and they are making the right decisions.  They know if they make the wrong decisions that they had a real chance of dying(like 50% chance).  They know that even if they were completely incompetent, there would be an average chance they'd win anyways, since they are the heroes of the story.  But, given bad luck one of them would die.  They want to avoid that, and luckily, they are given a bunch of "cool powers" that can tip the odds in their favor if they use them correctly.Right now, an encounter that has "significance" is still, basically a 95% chance of winning given even modest skill(and say an 85% of winning with no skill at all).  The average one is easy to beat just by rolling to hit and healing the damage afterwards and casting the most basic attack spells.  The only reason it has significance at all is that it uses up resources.Players prefer the nail biting encounters closer to the ones mentioned at the beginning, They want to know that they WOULD have lost if only they didn't use all of their cool powers.  Unfortunately, using all your cool powers generally means using up way more resources than 20%.  Therefore making them rest as soon as the nail biting encounter is done.There is currently a HUGE difference in flavor between "I attack with my longsword for 15 damage.  I get hit for 15 damage.  He magic missiles it for 15 damage.  Oh look, it died.  Now we'll heal the damage we took." and "I fireball that group over there for 30.  They are still up?  He attacks the big guy for 20.  He's still up?  We get hit for 50.  The cleric casts his highest level cure spell for 35.  The barbarian hits the big guy for 30.  Still up?  The wizard takes 15 damage from arrows.  Next round."The first uses up resources and is significant but isn't very much fun.  The second uses up a LOT of resources and is much more fun.  Played correctly, though, both have the same risk of death.  It's just that in the first example, you save your high level spells and use low level ones instead.Mechanically there is almost no difference.  The damage being done to the group each round is only slightly more than they heal each round.  This means that barring bad luck, the party knows it's just a matter of a number of rounds before they win.  However, if the fighter delays rather than attacking one round or the wizard spends a round readying for something that never happens, it decreases their odds of winning a decent amount.  Everyone has to pull together to win.</blockquote>

Verification